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Abstract

A post-structural approach to exploring identity is taken in this paper in that identity is considered here as being socially constructed through discourse, which has deep implications for the shaping of subjectivity and practice. Given both the potential academisation and Anglicisation of Irish schools, and the additional re-drawing of what constitutes as a ‘good teacher’, repositioning Irish teachers’ subjectifications, this paper highlights the important issue of how teachers (re-)construct themselves in particular ways and make sense of their professional selves when their personal values, motivations, principles and deeply held beliefs about education and how it should be experienced are challenged. Ultimately, this paper projects that adopting a business-like ethos in Irish schools will have a negative impact on Irish teachers’ identities.

Keywords

Privatisation neoliberalism discourse teacher identity Ireland

Introduction

The global education reform movement, the increased international exchange of policies and practices, has become accepted as a ‘new educational orthodoxy’ within many education reforms around the world (Sahlberg, 2014). With an emphasis on, for example, standardisation and outcomes-based education, test-based accountability, and corporate forms of school management, this movement imposes a business model on education, whereby a public service such as education becomes more like business and business-like (Ball 1999a, 2017; Ball and Youdell, 2008). Education, thus, becomes a commodity, a private good in a competitive marketplace. The logic underpinning this movement is that through the use of business-methods, schools will act more efficiently and perform more effectively, raising educational standards.

While England has been a key player in this movement, Ireland is only joining. Elsewhere, I write about the potential academisation and Anglicisation of Irish schools, and how advanced school autonomy is not suited to the Irish context (forthcoming in Irish Educational Studies). This process would ultimately see Irish schools become more like English schools, and more corporate. However, as the current professional culture within Irish schools differs from the corporate culture of schools in England, the aim of this paper is to present the concept of adopting a business-like approach to education in Ireland as being a threat to the way(s) in which Irish teachers make sense of their professional selves.

Background

The Irish government has faced severe pressure in recent years to grow the economy. One possible way of doing this is through the production of a highly educated and globally competitive workforce (Sloane et al., 2013) as determined by performances in international comparison studies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys. Since the mid-1990s the OECD has increased its agency as a policy actor in global education (Sellar and Lingard, 2013) as the dominant view among economists is that neoliberalism provides the only route for economic growth (Giddens, 2006). PISA surveys are now accepted as criteria of good educational performance (Sahlberg, 2007, 2011) and countries compete with one another in these assessments as a means of demonstrating global competitiveness. The increasing epistemic dominance of these tests reflect the OECD’s capacity to shape the views of key actors in education and

through its influential work on knowledge-based economies, lifelong learning and skills, the OECD has helped to shape understandings of the education systems that national governments must create to increase productivity and sustain growth. At the same time, the OECD has developed and increasingly extended the reach of PISA and other assessments that measure the skills and competencies it has identified as being important in the new century (Sellar and Lingard, 2013: 722).

With education now regarded primarily from an economic point of view (Ball, 2017), the recent economic downturn in Ireland, coupled with the growing epistemic power of the OECD and PISA, has meant that neoliberal marketisation principles of competition, choice, autonomy and self-steering have become the preferred options for an Irish education system aligned with these new technologies of governmentality (Mooney Simmie et al., 2016).

Why this topic is important

Ball (2016a) and a range of Irish academics (see for example Gleeson, 2010; Kirwan and Hall, 2016; Lynch and McGarr, 2016; Lynch et al., 2012; McNamara et al., 2009, 2011; Mooney Simmie, 2014; O’Hara et al., 2007) have acknowledged that neoliberalism and the language of the market are now evident in Irish education policy. Since the late 1990s, Irish public policy-making has been driven by neoliberalism, and an educational market in the private sector has emerged through private tuition centres for school students (Lynch and Moran, 2006) and online teacher education programmes provided by private, for-profit providers. Recent reforms are directed towards embedding a marketised and privatised Irish school system (Carr and Beckett, 2016). Of specific interest to this paper are the proposals by the Department of Education and Skills (DES) to advance school autonomy in Ireland (see DES, 2015a, 2015b). The DES (2015b: 4) has advised that it is not debatable whether or not school autonomy should be advanced, and that school autonomy will be advanced in Ireland, and the English academy model is acknowledged as being a ‘blueprint’ for the fully autonomous school (DES, 2015b: 14).

In addition to these proposals, the market-led and managerial discourses that are becoming more prominent in Irish education have repositioned Irish teachers’ subjectifications, with state inspectors becoming sole arbiters of ‘good teaching’ (Mooney Simmie et al., 2016). There has been a rising tide of performative pressures and calls for greater accountability within schools (McCormack et al., 2015), and a ‘regulatory framework and a complex rubric of top-down monitoring, surveillance and inspections’ have been on the state’s agenda (Mooney Simmie, 2014: 194). The evaluation of teacher performance has been particularly foreign to the culture of Irish schools (Flood, 2011) however, and Sugrue (2009: 384) has also warned that it ‘would not be in the long-term interest of principals to seek to enhance their sense of professionalism by offering up their teaching colleagues as sacrificial lambs on the altar of accountability’. Indeed, at both an internal and external level, teaching spaces in Ireland have traditionally been private spaces.

This paper is therefore timely in highlighting the important issue of teacher identity in performative, business-like education given both the potential academisation and Anglicisation of Irish schools and the additional re-drawing of what constitutes a ‘good teacher’ – especially given the impact these shifts in direction will have on Irish teachers’ identities. Furthermore, despite these emergent discourses gaining prominence, there is a paucity of research available on how these reforms will impact Irish teachers. It has been noted that like in other jurisdictions where neoliberal policies have been adopted, the work practices of Irish teachers have intensified in recent years (Houtsonen et al., 2010; Mooney Simmie and Edling, 2016), and recent research on early-career teachers in Ireland by Burns (2016) suggests that the investment of school leadership in market ideology has potentially damaging effects on teachers’ professional identities. This paper therefore discusses Irish teacher identity in business-like education, underpinned by a neoliberal agenda supplemented with managerialism and performativity.

Business-like education

Privatisation

Privatisation refers to the use of the private sector in the provision of goods and services (Burch, 2009) previously provided by the state. Ball (2009) sees this process as being a key strategy in education reform and according to Wilkinson (2006) the UK government seems concerned only to welcome the business world into the staffrooms and classrooms of England. Most notably, England has seen a dramatic rise in a new form of school over the last decade – the academy school. Based on neoliberal marketisation principles of competition and choice, these schools ultimately operate like businesses in the marketplace and have been promoted as being the schools of the future (Gorard, 2014).

Academies

Academies are independent, non-fee-paying, non-profit-making schools that are state-funded but contracted out to entrepreneurs, businesses, charities, etc. They are also autonomous in that they are not obliged to follow the national curriculum, abide by the national pay scale for teachers, and they are free to alter the structure of the school day/term. This policy of academising state schools was introduced as a means of generating the conditions to enable state-funded schools to exercise autonomy and self-governance (Wilkins, 2012) in a system driven by per-capita funding from the government (Bhattacharya, 2013). This concept of autonomy and independence is based on removing the school from local democratic accountability by building on the self-managing school as a business in a competitive market place (Gunter and McGinty, 2014), promoting new policy narratives, entrepreneurism and competitiveness (Ball, 2011).

Business-like schools

It must be noted however, that business-like education does not solely refer to academy schools. Academies may be more business-like than other schools, but other schools in England are certainly business-like too. According to Courtney (2015), there has been a clear, strategic attempt in England over the last three decades to corporatise school leadership, and leaders of all school types are susceptible to this. Consequently, as Braun (2017: 182) puts it,

the high pressure environments of English schools, whether they are academies … or ‘ordinary’ schools … shift the traditional understanding of what it means to work as a teacher.

Therefore, whether Irish schools are academised or just ‘Anglicised’ as they move in a more neoliberal direction, this paper contends that the same impact will be had on Irish teachers’ identities. To move in a more neoliberal direction, and to emulate the English education system to any extent, means making schools more corporate. Indeed, once schools of any type are opened up to the market, they become business-like schools.

The theoretical framework

A post-structural approach to exploring identity is taken in this paper in that identity is considered to be socially constructed, fluid and dynamic, and formed and informed through ‘discursive practices’ (see Trent, 2010). Neoliberalism is not just an ideology, but also a discourse (Sharma, 2015; Springer, 2012), and both discourse and ideology lead to identity (McAdams in Kouhpaeenejad and Gholaminejad, 2014). Ideology is a set of intellectual beliefs stimulated and constrained by the shared beliefs of society (Kim, 2007), and embedded in discourse, it becomes a particular interpretation of reality (Lück and Rudman, 2017) that may be distorted to serve or reflect the interests of a particular group (Hodge, 2012). These social representations that define the social identity of a social group are expressed and generally reproduced in the social practices of the group’s members, and more particularly acquired, confirmed, changed and perpetuated through discourse (Van Dijk, 2006). Hammack (2008: 222), for example, defines identity as ‘ideology cognised through the individual engagement with discourse’, and Pavlenko (2001: 326) too, contends that identity is ‘intrinsically linked to particular languages and ways of speaking through ideologies’. As Ruelle and Peverelli (2017) point out, group members constantly construct their identity via ongoing social interaction, creating a shared story about the group and its membership. Post-structuralism can therefore play an important role in unsettling and challenging particular claims to truth in education and education discourse (Niesche and Gowlett, 2015). It is an approach that can help us better understand the construction of educational subjects in neoliberal reforms (Rodriguez, 2008), and highlight the unanticipated consequences of neoliberal policies (Barnett, 2005) as it highlights how teachers either participate in or resist particular discourses.

The power of the neoliberal discourse

One of the consequences of the performative view of teachers is that the discourse of professionalism (i.e. what it means to be a professional) has been homogenised (Wilkins et al., 2012), regardless of teacher background – in this case, Irish teachers. The neoliberal discourse constructs meanings for teachers about who they are in relation to others (Miller Marsh, 2002) and how they understand their own success (Buchanan, 2015). For example, the prevailing view in the official discourse of what it means to be a ‘good teacher’ shapes how teachers feel about their own practice and professional standing, and if they feel that they do not fit with this dominant view, they may see themselves as incompetent, or experience themselves as ‘other’. Defining what counts as ‘effective’ teaching is not easy (see James and Pollard, 2011) however, and for most is a subjective interpretation. Williamson (2013) argues that there is no such thing as a ‘good teacher’, but a wide range of different views and ideas about what constitutes as such. In England, the discourse surrounding what it means to be a good teacher or a good school is controlled by Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education), a private inspection team used to carry out regular school inspections to ensure that schools are complying with the governments agenda by judging them against predetermined criteria. This criteria, which is used to grade lessons and teachers reduces the vocabulary for describing them to numerical data; for example, 1= outstanding, 4 = inadequate. Woods and Jeffrey (2002) highlight the negative impact grading a teacher’s work in quantitative terms has on teachers, who view criticism of their teaching as being a criticism of them as a person as identity is so interconnected. Teachers and schools need to accept this discourse (Perryman, 2010) however, and perform in ways dictated by it (Perryman, 2007) because even though what it now means to be a teacher, a professional, has been re-worked, as teachers become ‘governed’ (Ozga in Ball, 2015) and ‘recognisable’ (Ball, 2016b) by numbers, the actual term ‘professionalism’ still consists of a discourse associated with and imbued with positivity:

Who does not want to be a professional, when the word is used so very often – in the worlds of education, of business, of politics, of entertainment – to indicate approval and respect? … while the definition of professionalism may change … the affective attachment to the word remains. Those of us labelled or self-perceiving as ‘professionals’ may not agree at the conscious level with what professionalism has come to signify in official discourses, but we still want to be professional, and to be seen as being professional, even if this is in relation to another’s conceptualisation of the term. (Moore and Clarke, 2016: 671)

Whether or not teachers agree with the ‘good teacher’ discourse of neoliberal education, or what it now means to be a teacher in a performative school with business models, albeit reluctantly, many adjust their identities and comply, or at least give the impression that they are complying by performing to the discourse and concealing their true feelings. The discourse in England has become too strong, and teachers have become aware of its strength and influence (Moore and Clarke, 2016). In the words of Ball (2003: 218):

To be relevant, up-to-date, one needs to talk about oneself and others, and think about actions and relationships in new ways … We learn to talk about ourselves and the relationships, purposes and motivations in these new ways … We must become adept at presenting and representing ourselves with this new vocabulary.

It becomes important to become ‘noticed’ through the manufacture of some kind of spectacle (Ball, 2000). Teachers need to express who they are as professional teachers by engaging in what Page (2017a) calls ‘conspicuous practice’ – the highly public display of practice to convey messages about professional status. It is important to become ‘visible in the right way and to the right people at the right time’ (Page, 2017a: 9), and to showcase success-stories:

the sharing of best practice is pure advertising with examples of pedagogical innovation and excellence presented at team meetings, particularly effective resources emailed round to colleagues and managers, new external partnerships pinned to noticeboards. Here, teachers do not wait for their practice to be surveilled … instead, they proactively share selected (and the emphasis here is on selected) practice. A related type is the sharing of good news or successes which, while often phrased as a success for the institution, is really a success of the individual. (Page 2017a: 10)

To even seek help from colleagues in living up to the discourse of what it now means to be a teacher means placing your perceived competence on the line (Hargreaves, 1998). Teachers are no longer just monitored vertically by management, but horizontally too by other teachers (Page, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c) and coerced through unstated expectations of their work (Webb in Perryman et al., 2017). The discourse therefore requires teachers to create new identities that take on board new kinds of extrinsic concerns based on competitive individualism where personal motives are given preference over impersonal values (Ball, 1999b). Inter-teacher relationships within the performative school therefore shift from being collegial to competitive, whereby teachers become rivals for promotions (the performative school requires a range of managers to monitor, to inspect, to assure quality, etc.) and challengers for survival (the performative school requires the removal of teachers identified as ‘underperforming’) – teachers need to strive to create and construct a ‘triumphant self’ where they become more than they were and better than others (Ball, 2003). In this sense the official teacher discourse of neoliberal education in English schools encourages teachers to outperform their colleagues and hide any signs of weakness as passing judgement not just on yourself but also on others becomes the ideal mode of talking about teaching (Hall and Noyes, 2009).

Teacher identity

Identity is the way we make sense of ourselves to ourselves and the image of ourselves that we present to others (Day and Kingston, 2008), and for a teacher, developing a teacher identity is an important professional step (Irwin and Hramiak, 2010). However, as discourses change so too does identity (Zembylas, 2003). Identity is dynamic and subject to ideologies (Mayes, 2010) that are constructed and maintained through co-occurring communicative contexts (Cotter and Marschall, 2006). How a person locates him/herself in relation to a discourse reflects the socially sanctioned dominance of particular ideologies and the subjugation of others (Sinclair in Sachs, 2001). In the particular policy era in England therefore, where accountability policies and discourses of accountability dominate due to the performative, market-driven, corporate culture of neoliberal education, such policies can be viewed as both the cause and the effect of ways that teachers understand themselves (Buchanan, 2015) in that they cause teachers to (re)construct themselves in particular ways and effect how they make sense of their professional selves.

Developing a teacher identity

The development of teacher identity is a process of socialisation (Wilkins et al., 2012), deeply embedded in one’s personal biography (Bukor, 2015), with the events and experiences in the personal lives of teachers being linked to the performance of their professional roles (see Day et al., 2006). Whether it be from their experiences as students, pre-service teachers, or qualified teachers in other schools, it has been well documented that teacher identity is closely linked with a teacher’s past experiences of education (Buchanan, 2015; Bullough, 1997; Calderhead and Robson, 1991; Hong, 2010; Lortie, 1975; Thomson and McIntyre, 2013). For example, the ‘apprenticeship of observation’, where teachers have spent countless hours observing their own teachers when they were students in school, is well documented (see for example, Borg, 2004; Boyd et al., 2013; Lortie, 1975; Smagorinsky and Barnes, 2014; Westrick and Morris, 2016) and can be seen to be largely responsible for the preconceptions teachers have developed of the role of the teacher. In England, Wilkins (2011) suggests the possible emergence of a ‘post-performative’ identity; a generation of teachers whose experiences as students has been of an increasingly performative schooling system, and whose approach to balancing accountability with autonomy is consequently relatively relaxed, while their motivations are more career-orientated and individualistic as they are aware of the opportunities for career progression in corporate education. Irish teachers also develop identities based on previous educational experiences (Kenny et al., 2015; Sugrue, 1997, 2004). In fact, recent research by Hennessy and Lynch (2017) actually revealed an increased importance placed on prior teaching and learning experiences by Irish pre-service teachers compared to international findings, which in contrast to the ‘post-performative’ teacher generation in England (Wilkins, 2011) would not have included experiences of performative, business-like driven school-life when they were students. Irish teacher identity is therefore likely to clash with such a school culture.

Irish teacher identity

Substantial amounts of Irish teachers see their professional identity as being grounded in their subject qualifications (Kiely in Gleeson et al., 2015), and in terms of ‘good’ teaching, they tend to rely heavily on traditional, didactic pedagogy and having strong subject-knowledge (Devine et al., 2013) and ‘subject expertise’ (Gleeson, 2012). Recent research on the professional identities of placement tutors on initial teacher education programmes in Ireland by Walsh and Dolan (2018: 7) also reveals that, for many, their professional identity is often linked to the subjects they once taught as classroom teachers. For some, especially in the early stages of their career as a placement tutor, they feel that the specific subject-based knowledge and practical advice that they accrued is a key aspect of their professional identity and is of significant value in their professional interactions with student teachers:

I think subject specific knowledge is critical for the teacher, as is the methodology of teaching that subject. And I know that mightn’t be fashionable, but scratch a teacher and you will get a maths teacher or a commerce teacher or an English teacher, and that’s their primary interest.

Irish teacher identity can also be seen to be based on having both authoritative control and good rapport with students. Irish teachers talk a lot about the importance of respect (Gleeson and O’Flaherty, 2016) and within Irish education there is a popular and dominant, culturally determined archetypal teaching identity based on strictness (Sugrue, 1997). A ‘good teacher’ is therefore often interpreted as being someone with ‘discipline’ and ‘control’, reflecting the prevailing attitude in Ireland that teaching is teacher directed (Sugrue, 1997), while also being perceived as having a strong personality underpinned by a commitment to care (ibid.) Furlong (2013: 79) has also reported similar findings in her study of Irish pre-service teachers:

If we were to construct a picture of the teacher the students wished to be (idealised identities) from their combined narratives one could argue that it would be: the caring, warm, approachable teacher … who is firm and in control. A teacher, who commands respect, yet is remembered fondly.

Furlong (2013) concludes that it is the traditional constructions of teacher identity that still exist in Ireland today. There is a culture in Ireland of the teacher being in control of the classroom in terms of both pedagogy and atmosphere. The other side of the sword, however, as is reflected by pre-service teachers’ desires to be caring, warm and approachable, is that an ethic of care may be assumed to support the teaching profession in Ireland (Collinson et al., 1999). Sexton (2007), for example, contends that Irish teachers see professionalism in terms of interpersonal relationships with students (and staff), in terms of their character and personality traits, and classroom-based issues. Similarly, research by Devine et al. (2013) on Irish teachers' constructs of a ‘good’ teacher revealed a high appreciation of and respect for students as ‘a “good” teacher has a love for children/young people’ and ‘is socially and morally aware’, being committed to the broader mission of teaching in terms of the social and moral formation of students. A more recent study again with Irish teachers by Devine and McGillicuddy (2016: 437) ‘re-affirmed the warm and respectful relationship they sought with their students’, and noted ‘more positive valuations of student/teacher relationships and disciplinary climates than among secondary school teachers in other countries’ (Devine and McGillicuddy, 2016: 428).

It is also reported that Irish teachers are mainly intrinsically and altruistically motivated (Clarke, 2009; Drudy, 2009; Heinz, 2013; Hennessy and Lynch, 2017). There is a lack of a definite career path for Irish teachers (Sugrue, 2011), with very little opportunities for advancement (Sugrue, 2002), and in the absence of formal department structures (Drudy and Lynch, 1993) like those found in England, the main opportunities for promotion for classroom-teachers in Ireland involves taking up full-time administration work at the expense of teaching (Drudy, 1993). However, Irish pre-service teachers are least motivated by ‘possibilities for promotion’ (Clarke, 2009), and according to Flood (2011), experienced Irish teachers also show a lack of interest in taking up principalship positions but for those that do, they mainly do so for intrinsic reasons. Recent research by Ummanel et al. (2016) reports that Irish teachers take promotion opportunities mostly as they arise, rather than seeking them out, and significantly, none of the principals they interviewed started their careers with aspirations to move into management in mind.

This is not an attempt at idealising Irish teachers by any means, but an acknowledgement of how Irish teacher identity is constructed and characterised in the literature, and certainly the absence of any ‘teaching crisis’ in Ireland (Conway and Murphy, 2013) has meant that Irish teachers have traditionally been highly thought of. It is only since late 2010 (after Ireland suffered a massive drop in the PISA standings) that any crisis has emerged (Conway, 2013), and certainly since then the general public have become more sceptical and critical of the teaching profession. Particularly during times of economic upheaval, teachers have often been targeted due to the extraordinary professional autonomy they were known to exercise, but also due to the perception that they were too resistant to change. For example, student teachers constructing teachers as ‘no longer enthusiastic’ and ‘dismissive of novel or innovative practices’, and expressing concerns that they too might become trapped in an ‘outmoded school culture’ (Hall et al., 2012) is rather telling of some undesirable school cultures that have developed in Ireland. Reflecting on the persona experienced teachers adopt in their presence, one student teacher says:

it is kind of bravado: ha, ha, we just go in and do nothing. (Hall et al., 2012: 111)

With Irish teachers not monitored in their classrooms (Lynch et al., 2012), or identified or punished for poor performances (McNamara et al., 2011), the mechanisms for dealing with incompetent teachers are largely non-existent (McNamara and O’Hara, 2012), and there has been a growing concern that teachers have too much autonomy. As one parent says,

Some teachers once qualified and in a secure job for life lose interest. There is no accountability. (McCormack et al., 2015: 521)

Furthermore, a public service agreement that now requires teachers to spend additional hours outside of their direct teaching time on activities that would have previously involved the school closing or timetabling a half-day has been widely regarded in teachers’ minds as a much-resented imposition, directly linked to a government austerity regime (Coolahan et al., 2017), and has done little to regain the public’s confidence.

It must be said however, that any negative connotations of teachers are largely down to the practices of a minority of teachers. There are, of course, teachers who have not upheld the professional integrity of the profession, and who have consequently brought it into disrepute, but it is the contention of this paper that the majority of Irish teachers are, as the literature largely suggests, intrinsically and altruistically motivated, and warm and caring. For if they were not, Ireland’s education system, which with the exception of a blip in form in PISA 2009, would not be the success that it is.

An identity crises?

Because of their emotional investments (see O’Connor, 2008), teachers can experience a range of negative emotions when long-held principles and practices are challenged, or when trust is eroded (Day and Kingston, 2008; Day et al., 2006). In England it is the performative agenda that is the most significant policy driver in affecting the construction of teacher identity (Wilkins et al., 2012), and Ball (1999b) argues that what it ‘means to be a teacher’ has changed, as teachers are ‘re-made’, changing who they are (2003). In Ireland too, what it means to be a teacher has changed in recent times (Kitching et al., 2009). The role of the Irish teacher is now evolving and expanding (Hennessy and Lynch, 2017) as new discourses carve out a new landscape for the profession (Conway, 2013).

The new official discourse of ‘good teaching’ in Irish education, which is largely in response to Ireland’s declining PISA 2009 scores, is now heavily promoting progressive, student-centred pedagogy, which is at odds with the dominant culture of the transmission of knowledge in Irish classrooms. For example, the national strategy for literacy and numeracy sets the tone for classrooms around the country:

All learners should also have regular opportunity to engage with those learning approaches, including cooperative learning, differentiated learning, active learning and problem-solving activity. (DES, 2011: 43)

The minister behind these reforms wanted ‘learning experiences more student centred’, and used reforms to ‘promote active learning, creativity and innovation, and to ‘address rote-learning’ (Quinn, 2012: 130). Similarly, teacher education programmes have since been reformed to place a greater emphasis on skills in pedagogy and assessment (DES 2015a, 2015b) and the Teaching Council wants student teachers encouraged to use a variety of teaching methodologies (2013) so that upon graduating they will understand ‘pupils as active agents in their own learning’ (2017: 25). This new discourse however, which Ball (2016a) notes as including checklists of skills and competencies which are being used to define and redefine the teacher, largely echoes what would constitute as ‘good teaching’ in an English academy in that it is based on a self-steering entrepreneurial culture that fails to consider the purpose of education (Mooney Simmie et al., 2016). Defining ‘best practice’ or even ‘good practice’ is used as a device to control and constrain (Lipman in Mooney Simme, 2012), and reduces schools to a site of struggle (Mooney Simmie et al., 2016). As Hamilton (2018) suggests, identity, beliefs and local and national context can combine to conspire against pedagogical change, even among teachers who know and appreciate its benefits. To quote one post-placement, Irish student teacher in Gleeson et al.’s (2015: 447) study,

Teachers define themselves in terms of their subject, (and) it is difficult to see a radical move away from this.

With teacher ‘control’ being embedded in Irish classrooms, and the teacher being positioned as ‘king/queen of the classroom’ (Coolahan et al., 2017), being subjected to surveillance, especially at an internal level, will undoubtedly be difficult for teachers to come to terms with. Furthermore, the warm and caring approach of Irish teachers is likely to prove problematic in the individualistic climate of business-like education where student progress is reduced to data at the expense of their social and personal development, and ultimately student–teacher relationships. In England, the traditional social, ethical and moral purposes of education have been displaced in the drive for efficiency, improved standards, higher targets and increased competition, all underpinned by economic rather than educational imperatives. This new teacher role demands a radical change of identity (Woods and Jeffrey, 2002) for teachers in that their humanistic, intrinsic and altruistic commitments and motivations, their desire to help and inspire, which are arguably most teachers’ reasons for entering the profession, are replaced by business-like targets.

According to Morgan et al. (2010), it is imperative for the Irish system to pay close attention to the relationship between the ethos of performativity and teachers’ motivation. Business-motivated approaches do not sit well with teachers (Lynch et al., 2012). In Ireland, there is ‘immense sensitivity’ to ‘evaluation in any form’ in the education system (McNamara and O’Hara, 2012: 84) and teachers are known to be negative about ‘anything that smacks of appraisal, planning, target-setting, benchmarking and so on’ (O’Hara and McNamara in McNamara et al., 2002: 201), and especially towards the evaluation system in England (McNamara and O’Hara, 2005, 2006, 2008; McNamara et al., 2009; O’Hara et al., 2007). As noted earlier however, Irish teachers do not appear to be extrinsically motivated, or career-orientated, and instead are motivated by a passion for their subject and a love for working with children. For the vast majority, they want to stay in the classroom teaching, and are disinterested in promotions that will take them away from the classroom. A business-like culture of formal hierarchies encouraging internal competitions for promotions will therefore be alien to Irish teachers, and perhaps problematic for their values.

It is also worth pointing out that the teaching profession in Ireland attracts high-quality candidates (Clarke, 2009; Hyland, 2012; Killeavy and Moore, 2001) with intense competition for places on teacher education programmes (Killeavy and Moloney 2009). For example, Drudy et al. (in Drudy, 2009) revealed that a substantial amount of Irish teachers opt for teacher education courses over the ‘highest prestige’ university courses that they would have been accepted on based on the entrance criteria had they expressed a first preference for them. This is very much in contrast to the UK, however, where generally it is the least qualified of those eligible that enter teacher-training (Huat See in Clarke, 2009). Given that teaching is a career-preference among Irish teachers, and the intrinsic and altruistic motivation that this preference is based on, coupled with their decision to enter a profession that could be described as being a career-less profession (Lortie, 1975) in that for the vast majority of them they will serve their whole careers as classroom teachers, it could be argued that Irish teachers, more so than English teachers, and certainly more than post-performative teachers, will struggle in a business-like system that in many ways strongly goes against their beliefs, values, motivations and educational expectations. It may come as no surprise therefore, that in the current absence of performative pressures and formal hierarchies in Irish schools, Irish teachers are generally happier than their English counterparts (O’Boyle, 2000).

If there is a lack of fit between a school’s culture and a teacher’s identity, as is likely to be the case for Irish teachers in a business-like school, the teacher must somehow manage that disconnect (Buchanan, 2015). According to Day (2007), teachers in a performative regime can only succeed by complying with the definitions others set for their work, and consequently, are faced with three options, as outlined by Forrester (2000): (a) conform to the system, (b) present an impression of conformity and (c) leave the profession altogether. For teachers who choose to either conform or pretend to conform, they are now required to set aside their personal beliefs and commitments (Ball, 2003), forgetting why they entered the profession, what they hoped to achieve, and how they wanted their students to experience school, all in an act of compliance. According to Moore and Clarke (2016), the problem for a lot of teachers is that they find themselves doing things that they do not believe in – their very convictions and motivations are felt to be challenged and undermined by policy directives. These teachers are therefore likely to experience a form of schizophrenia (see Strauss, 1995; Ball, 2000, 2003) in the workplace, caught in a dichotomy between what they think education is about and what ‘education’ is asking them, and forcing them to do. In complying and going against their own beliefs and values, these teachers are reduced to re-constructing their identity as what Whitehead (1989) coins as a ‘living contradiction’ in that they feel that they are being instructed to do things that are at odds with their own deeply held views of what education is fundamentally for and how it should be experienced (Moore et al., 2002; Moore and Clarke, 2016).

Concluding thoughts

Ball (1999b, 2003) argues that the heart of the educational project has been gouged out and left empty. In England, ‘education’ as we know it has been replaced by corporatism, managerialism and entrepreneurism. Whether they realise it or not, teachers need to be more extrinsically motivated, replacing the humanistic, altruistic and caring approach of teaching with a colder, individualistic manner that is self-orientated and goal-driven. To be a success, teachers need to undergo constant monitoring and meet set targets, and they need to prove themselves to be worthy enough of being promoted above colleagues. Teachers who embrace the mandates of performativity are rewarded (see Keddie, no date), but doing so involves losing sight of the students’ goals, particularly from a holistic point of view, and focusing instead on personal, material goals. The following comment from a teacher in Wilkins’s (2011: 399) study exemplifies this shift in priorities among teachers in England:

It’s more about me now. I used to think teaching was what you can do for kids but now I think about myself developing … where my career’s going.

Thus, the role of the teacher at a classroom level in England has changed dramatically. Ironically, ‘post-performative’ teachers view this conception of teacher identity as being necessary for their work, but are not able to articulate what exactly it is that leads to improvement (ibid.) – they just accept it. The power of the neoliberal discourse renders teachers to comply without necessarily questioning what it is that they are doing, or why they are doing it, and a key issue of concern for them is that their efforts will not be captured and appreciated (Keddie, no date) as they start to do things simply because it makes them look good (Ball, 2003). To draw on Chatelier and Rudolph (2018: 12), neoliberal policy discourses shift

the focus of teachers’ care away from the student and onto the teachers’ own need for professional recognition and advancement.

It is clear therefore, that the identities of Irish teachers will need to undergo an adjustment if they are to survive the potential academisation of Irish schools. In Ireland, education is deeply ingrained in the national psyche (Quinn, 2012) and has always been regarded as a key element of national identity (Harford, 2010). Ireland’s commitment to education has been one of the most significant features of Irish society for centuries (Dolan, 2012), and rather than constructing new identities, Irish people are more committed to their cultural and historical identity (see West-Burnham, 2011). What it currently means to be a teacher in Ireland is very different to what it means to be a teacher in England, and it is likely that Irish teachers will have to do things that contradict their own personal values and beliefs on education and how they think it should be experienced if the conservative culture of Irish schools (Gleeson et al., 2015) adopts a business-like mantra. The pedagogical and professional autonomy that teachers will be used to will no longer be accommodated and their intrinsic and altruistic motivations may be undermined by the individualistic, corporate culture of academies as their work becomes organised around neoliberal market principles.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Patrick Bailey, Institute of Education, University College London, for his comments on earlier versions of the paper. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and supportive feedback.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Craig Skerritt got educated at University College Cork and University College London and is a former post-primary teacher and school leader now working at the Centre for Evaluation, Quality and Inspection, Dublin City University where he researches and lectures on school evaluation.

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Discourse and teacher identity in business-like education

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Background

Why this topic is important

Business-like education

Privatisation

Academies

Business-like schools

The theoretical framework

The power of the neoliberal discourse

Teacher identity

Developing a teacher identity

Irish teacher identity

An identity crises?

Concluding thoughts

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

References